“ – the dangerous words, the padlocked words, the words that do not belong to the dictionary,
for if they were written there, written out and not maintained by ellipses,
they would utter too fast the suffocating misery of a solitude …”
Jean Genet
Introduction to “Soledad Brother – The Prison Letters of George Jackson”

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Thursday, 11 July 2013

The Quality Of Writing Is Strained - Friday Flash

I typed a log entry
into/on to my tablet. Then I deleted it and watch it seemingly become snaffled by the roiling plasma. Apposite word that 'tablet'. Harks back to the origins of
writing, pieces of flint gouging out marks on stone beneath their sharpened tips.
Matter grinding away at matter. Energy transference, heat sparks engendered
through the friction. The intaglio letters cupped within the stone. Any natural
cleft in the petrous grain, easily confused with a character whose shape it
coincidentally approximates. Who can say where the boundary of a character ends
and the natural stratum of the stone resumes? The letters utterly interacting
with the flow of the grain around them, since one is hewn from the tissue of
the other. Letters as impressions in negative space. That stone which was
formerly there, now hacked away to leave the fossilised shapes of an alphabet.

Progress to mankind writing
on parchment or papyrus with quill or stylus. Two materially different substances, pigment and
canvas. The ink licked on to the surface of the fabric, filling its empty plane
with characters. Colonising it. Again at the stiff pointed tip, although
scribes also used the reedier kalamos to brush the ink on, like drummers who
have both drum sticks and brushes for that more jazz vibe. Just as well really,
or we'd have to doff our caps at the Freudian imagery of a shaft spilling its
liquid seed on to a receptive membrane. The mark of the scribe, being the accidental transference of ink into the whorls of the pads of his fingers.And it's not just fleshy fingertips. For unlike the carved incisions in
stone tablets, here the ink rests upon the host surface, albeit some of
the ink will seep and spread into the fibres beneath. In the main the two
substances coexist in a space that is not as blended as those characters cut
into stone. The inked boundaries of the letters delineate them from a
differently coloured paper textile. They sit flush on a plane that is itself
flat. The ink does not really have any texture of its own. No raised surfaces. The
two do not interact, in the sense that where the ink lies the paper beneath is effaced
and where the ink is not, the paper bears sole possession untouched. Once the
ink has dried and settled, the two are inert from each other. Of course with
illuminated manuscripts, where gold leaf was being applied to the pages, then
such calligraphy would have a texture. And while such manuscripts provided an
interesting approach to representing the divine light in halos and the
illuminated script itself, let's just say the legerdemain of gold leaf doesn't actually represent
how light operates. Rather, it more approximates the reflective properties of the
moon's light actually originating from the sun. Reflected glories as second-hand light. A paucity of illumination.

Then on to moveable
typesetting of the printing press and its personalised version in the form of
the typewriter. An embossed letter block, whether placed in a composing stick,
or at the end of a typebar, which then punches an impression filled in with
ink. An inverted return to carving letters in stone through incision. Directly with hammer
rather than chisel. The paper surface is indelibly altered, distorted, beneath
the inroad of the press. The letters sit on a plane, but not flush. They are
slightly sunken into its weft, a fact you can plainly see were you to view the
underside of the paper, with its Braille-like displacements projecting through
towards your eye. There is something almost animated by the process of smashing force upon force. Each typebar a metal monolith, with a homunculus letter clinging on for dear life to its surface, being smashed and pounded by the press of a lever launching the typebar like a ballista. Particularly if you used the red half of the ribbon, pressed in blood. Off key and off centre, the type was idiosyncratic. Personal. Die cast stamped with the metallic grain of the writer's force brought down on the keys.

Of course in time, electronic typewriters and superior
printing technologies ironed out these concavities and restored the smooth,
unbroken plane of the canvas that houses the letters ranged there in regular
blocks of text. The white of the paper merely acting as spacers between words,
lines and paragraphs. Typescript orderly ranged across the paper, but more concerned
with proportion to itself, so that the paper fades into the background. Print
and paper barely having any relationship one to the other.

And now we are come to
the present state of affairs. The plasma screen, a curvy sea in which the
letters hang seemingly unmoored. Movable to anywhere on the display. The dancing characters which can pirouette and spin across
the turbid screen as they are formatted. It is hard to determine which is more
vaporous, screen or letters mounted there. The plasma remains indifferent to
what it plays host to, yet it utterly determines its nature. In the ineffable
coding that remains hidden and unknowable. Somehow, like planets in spacetime,
these characters too interact with the curved plasma and the two shape one
another. No longer is the screen an inert host. Yet neither letters nor plasma
ocean possess significant mass. This is not like the heft of a planet curving
proximate space around it. This is more akin to particle physics.
Letters like elemental particles, brushed from the keystroke perhaps to become manifest
in the plasmatic field. Colliding hard up against their neighbour, expressing
their valency. The nature of their charge.

And thus do our letters evanesce and die. Oh they persist in some ghostly form, as hypertext, but they are quickly interred by the next rolling mass of text which too will be overwhelmed and underwritten, or should that be underwhelmed and overwritten? The letters, our letters, have become cast asunder from our fingers. Left to drift and do battle with CEO algorithms in the plasmatic main. The quality of writing has been strained through being shorn of material paper through which to filter it.

9 comments:

I really liked how this moved through the stages of the written word. I particularly liked the comparison of the quill or stylus to plasma screen. Somehow I think the beauty of the action of writing was lost when we gave up that feathered quill.

I loved this line: "The mark of the scribe, being the accidental transference of ink into the whorls of the pads of his fingers."

WOW! What a goregeous journey through history there! And I got the feeling that all of this were going through the mind of that person we glimpsed at the very beginning- the one just pausing for a moment whilst fidling on his tablet. I could imagine all of his thoughts following this long, vibrant path through the history of print. So many great images in there, so many lyrical phrases. Just lovely.

Helen's favorite line is also my favorite line. I also love the "die cast" line. Your mind is just amazingly brilliant Marc and I feel honored that you share that brilliance with us.

Interesting - just yesterday I was reading a blog (and I'm sorry I can't recall who wrote it) where a woman described how an Etch-a-Sketch works, how it's the absence of the grainy beads that gives us the image, not the beads themselves.

Beautifully composed. :-) I want to be cremated and the ashes scattered, but now a selfish bit of me wants an engraved stone somewhere - preferably with something on it which will make future generations who stumble upon it go Hmmmm...

This has such a beautiful flow to it, Marc, and I loved some of the description like the ink colonising the canvas; "The mark of the scribe, being the accidental transference of ink into the whorls of the pads of his fingers." and the "pressed in blood" red ribbon of the typewriter. But the last paragraph made me so sad: "And thus do our letters evanesce and die" - I'm going to keep writing letters and cards, and more importantly stories, so that some words live on in the white noise of all the other words out there.

I loved how this flowed. After 5000 years, we're back to writing on tablets! It could have been made a little more stuffy and become An Incompleat History of Text, but I liked it better this way.

Given sufficient time, all writing—or at least the meaning—is lost. There are petroglyphs from ancient India, with no Rosetta Stone to provide a key, for example. There are other examples where linguists aren't even sure whether they're looking at writing or design motifs. Did the Babylonians sneer at the Egyptians for writing on papyrus, or lament its impermanence the way some today lament the disassociation of paper and the written word?

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